The lawyers will be paid by Oracle, win or lose. They won't get paid if they're not involved in a lawsuit. Oracle wants them involved in a lawsuit that they will probably lose. Turning Oracle down is an expensive way to be ethical.

Oracle can go after infringers profits, but in doing so it has to give up on statutory damages.

The Judge has pointed out that they haven't submitted any evidence supporting that Google has any profits associated with the rangeCheck method that is at issue, so this may not be a wise course of action.

Maybe they are planning to show a graph of Oracle profits since its existance vs lines of code that Oracle owns. Then claim that by extrapolating that graph, 9 lines of code is worth a hundred billion dollars, "but ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we are being nice by only claiming 6.1 billion".

Not that it's entirely relevant, but indirect profit still counts as profit with regards to IP.

True, but what is relevant is that the judge pointed out that Oracle hadn't submitted any evidence of profits, hence as far as the court is concerned, there are no profits. The court is not obliged to plead any parties case for them, the parties are obliged to submit evidence and it a party refuses to submit any evidence then it's not up to the court to find that evidence.

Oracle did submit such proof. Google had it stricken. Oracle got a second chance, with instructions what they need to fix. They submitted a second report, but ignored the instructions. That got stricken too. Despite earlier claim by the Judge to the contrary, Oracle got a third chance. They ignored the instructions, yet again. All relevant parts were stricken. That is why Oracle does not have any evidence of profits.

The range is [fromIndex, toIndex), so the end of the range is exclusive and hence checkRange(100, 17, 100) is supposed to be valid.

Of course you would expect that to be documented in checkRange rather than having to look at all the callers and seeing how they use it, but apparently no one bothered. Which makes that it was copied pretty clear cut, I would hope two people couldn't be that silly.

I assume they start at 0, since the code is also checking to see if fromIndex < 0. So either the code is wrong on one end or the other, but for all I know about Java, indexes could start at zero and go up to the number given...

What's amusing is that the 9 lines in question don't even implement the algorithm; they perform a quick sanity check before the real computation starts. Is this really the best they have? Couldn't they have found more creative lines of code to be infringing on a copyright?

Anyway I've been looking some stuff up. TimSort was originally written into Python [python.org] by Tim Peters in 2002 (BSD-style license). If I'm not mistaken, that would mean that Sun wrote a trivial check as part their own re-implementation of someon

From WP:"Eidetic memory (/adtk/), commonly referred to as photographic memory,is a medical term, popularly defined as the ability to recall images, sounds, orobjects in memory with extreme precision and in abundant volume."

I would assert(tm) that the class of programmers a company like Google hireswould have Eidetic memory to one degree or another. Fundamental patternswould stick and be used little different that humming a tune in the shower.

Oracle has a history of going after smaller companies, (Ask me how I know.) and threatening litigation. Smaller companies usually fold, and just pay out. It is cheaper than court. I love that they have decided to go after someone who can afford to say "Let's let the courts decide."

"May 12, 2012. In a highly controversial Ohio court filing today, Oracle Corp. demanded damages of 6 quintillion dollars for the unauthorized use of derived literary works, including the sun, sea and sky, and fishes, animals and rocks dated from about 6000 years ago. A tiny chosen sample of humans is also expected to be sold off to the highest bidder to pay for initial court expenses."

The larger figures quoted ($6.1 billion) refer to the estimated total for all infringement claims. The $150,000 discussed today is for one claim. Of course, the whole case doesn't revolve around the nine lines of code. The big (unresolved) questions are about copyright of the APIs and infringement of patents.

The engineer made was rewriting the sort function for dalvik and contributed it back to java. He was the original author of the java sort function, and reused the java sort range check function since he believed it would all be reintegrated back into the the original java sort.

Not only simple and small. The author of both copies is the same person: Josh Bloch. He wrote the original lines while working for Sun, and repeated the same code while working for Google. So, according the law, Josh Bloch plagiarized himself

Copyright infringement is not theft or plagiarism, it's tortuous interference. If you provide to people a copyrighted work when they could only otherwise get it legitimately by paying the copyright holder, you're on the hook for the copyright holder's losses. Just because you don't understand piracy doesn't mean you get to pretend it's ok.

I have the perfect analogy for this. I'm a sound engineer, and for mixing live shows on digital consoles I can save my mix parameters of a band onto a USB key and recall them onto a same-model digital board in a competing music venue. If I load the mix I was paid to prepare by venue A into the console at competing venue B, does venue A have the right to sue venue B?

The answer is this: if I charged venue B less because I'd already done the work paid for by venue A, then venue A could reasonably claim half

He wrote it for Sun/Oracle while working for Sun/Oracle, hence the copyright lies with Sun/Oracle. The fact that he wrote the lines doesn't change the fact that he doesn't own the copyright.

Things would be different if his employment contract with Sun/Oracle had said "All code produced by the employee is property of the employee and the employer merely gains a perpetual license to use and redistribute them" or if he had made a special deal about rangeCheck() to that effect. But that's highly unlikely.

While I can see an entire program or file being given copyright which are creative in nature, it seems unreasonable that Sun/Oracle could own a copyright on a 9-line utilitarian rangeCheck function that could never be written the same way again by anyone including the original author. Was he supposed to name the variables something different? How is a programmer even supposed to remember what code they've written over the years? Chances are for a utility function, you would name things in your current co

I understand the entire copyright thing but how the HELL is a software engineer supposed to remember every line of code that he's ever written? If he later goes to work at a different company and re-writes the same lines for a relatively simple function like this one what happens? Can it always end like this with a lawsuit?
It just feels to me that it's a waste of time to go to court over a few lines of, potentially copied, code written by one man twice.

I think that copyright isn't designed to handle cases like this. That's a real issue, especially when we're talking about trivial code like that. Perhaps copyright needs a lower bar; some point where you can say: "This is too trivial to be covered." Of course we'd need to find a reasonable definition for what's copyrightable in terms of code and we'd need to get big media to agree, at least as far as US copyright is concerned.

This is a topic where badly-planned rules could end up doing more harm than good

Q. You left Sun and joined Google in 2004. What did you do at Google?A. I ported existing Google infrastructure that was primarily accessible from C++ so that it was accessible to Java. I joined the Android team in December 2008 or January 2009. Android had already been released, and phones were in the market.

...

Q. Do you know of the existence of other rangecheck() functions?A. Yes, there's one in arrays.java. I wrote it. [Timsort: from Tim Peters, and originally in Python. The Java implementation was a port.]Q. Where did you get the Python version of Timsort? Was it open source [this was 2007, pre-Android]?A. Yes, Guido [van Rossum] pointed me to it, it's under a permissive open-source license.Q. What did you want to do with your Java Timsort?A. Put it into OpenJDK (an open implentation of the SE platform).Q. Who controlled OpenJDK?A. Sun.Q. How does someone contribute to OpenJDK, and had you done it before?A. Yes. [Discussion about source repositories, and Doug Lee at Oswego, NY].Q. If you worked for Google, why would you contribute to Sun's JDK?A. Java is important to me; it's given me a lot.Q. Why did you use the same rangecheck() function in Timsort as was in arrays.java?A. It's good software engineering to reuse an existing function.Q. But why use the exact same code?A. I copied rangecheck() as a temporary measure, assuming this would be merged into arrays.java and my version of rangecheck() would go away.[Discussion of Timsort dates and Android work dates.]Q. Was Timsort accepted and added into OpenJDK?A. Yes.

In other words, a Google engineer, working at Google, wrote a function and contributed it to Java (for free). Now Oracle is trying to sue over it because of that copyright assignment, and claiming that the freely contributed code is hugely valuable and that the contributor therefore owes them big money for using it. Even if this is technically legal for them to sue over, Oracle really deserves to DIAF over this.

The original author wrote the same utility function twice for two different projects, and this is against the law? How is this even an issue?

I'm befuddled.

Because you signed a contract stating you wouldn't.

And in this case, it looks like Oracle will get a trivial sum because you did, trivially, break the law.

Is it illegal to wander across the street haphazardly? Sure. Is it a terrible offense? No, it's called jaywalking, and you might get a small fine for doing so. And it makes sense to discourage people from wandering into oncoming traffic.

Oracle is out exactly nothing because of Google's infringement. Google's benefit from using that code instead of rolling their own -- and they clearly intended to roll their own -- was less than an hour of a competent programmers time. So the benefit to Google was at most $200.

Copyright law is not intended to protect a few lines of code. It's intended to protect the ownership and merchantability of a significant body of work.

Let's hope they award Oracle what they ACTUALLY LOST by Google's mistake.

Barring formatting changes, considering the exception is different depending on the case, there would still need to be nine lines. I do wonder why they did not use the if/else construct though. I seems kind of wasteful to run checks on cases at are no longer possible.

Dude, you were easy. We didn't let them use the same characters. Usually the blatant copying of a "{" nailed them - lots of people seemed to copy that for some reason. The TAs loved it though - grading the assignments was really easy.

pretty much any c program can be written in under 9 lines of code. Of course, some of those lines will be very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very long...

Given the little I understand about coding, there are usually zillions of ways (many convoluted) to come up with the correct results if you don't care about doing it very well, don't care about performance, storage, robustness or readability. You could write a program to write a large subset of the possible programs.

RIAA has been awarded millions in their pursuits against individuals who gave some music away. Then we have a company that is blatantly abusing copyright laws and makes tens of billions an year, and they get punished $150,000!

Someone should look into US court system.

This comment is so bloated with troll and stupid... I believe my brain bled by reading it.

The rich have pretty close to 100% control over political office and media access. I don't really see the point in differentiating.

The problem with remarks like this is that when you try to nail down who "the rich" are, they inevitably become "people who run everything", so it's effectively a tautology. So there's some vast conspiracy of people "controlling" everything, except you can never find any ultimate point to it. Money? They're already rich and have more money than any of them need. Power? They already have it all, and further, what are they supposedly *doing* with it?

Are you kidding? What they're doing with it is ensuring maintenance on the status quo where possible, and gradually shifting the wealth created by our society even more into their control in order to reduce social mobility.

I contact my representative regularly. They don't respond. I try to get people to vote them out of office. It isn't working. I'm not capable of being persuasive enough to achieve the kind of change we need.

I don't know where you live, but where I live and across most of the country the liberals are the ones pushing high density housing. The McMansions were built by the unrestricted greed is good set. There are things liberals don't get right, but this isn't one of them.

Interestingly enough, if you do the math you will see that the poor out number the rich by a large enough amount that the poor are more powerful than the rich. But make sure the poor never actually catch on to that fact or else they might actually use their power.

In theory, the poor may collectively be more powerful than the rich, but because there's more of them the costs associated with actually organising and exercising that power are higher. For instance, suppose a handful of wealthy billionaires think that they want the law changed in a particular way that benefits them. Because their individual benefits from the change are high and they each have lots of resources, they can rationally afford to carry out their own in-depth analysis of what the law change does and whether it will benefit them and to follow it as it passes through Congress to make sure that it doesn't get amended in detrimental ways. It'd be irrational for poor individuals to each carry out this kind of in-depth analysis of whether laws benefit them because their individual expected gain from expending the time and resources required to do so is so much smaller than the cost, leaving them reliant on third-party sources of information like Fox News which have their own - often conflicting - interests.

Because the poor only have power in large numbers, the corruption is naturally averaged out. It also suffers great deals of inertia and communications overhead that the power of a single rich and powerful person doesn't have to deal with.

The divisibility of a collective also means that in a power struggle, individuals stand to suffer far greater consequences than individuals with significant wealth and power.

Powerful people aren't all super-rich. There's a lot of politicians (esp. at lower levels: city mayors, for instance) who are really just middle-class. Of course, the corrupt ones try to use their position to vault themselves into the rich classes. The OP has a good point; we should be watching out for these people, to prevent them from succeeding in that quest (where they'll become both rich and more powerful).

Certainly they're not all super rich, particularly at the city/town level. However, even there they tent to be quite upper middle class. Far enough that the lower class sees them as rich. Lets just say that for them, total blow out economic disaster means they are forced to retire into a modest but comfortable middle class existence, not end up on welfare like much of the middle class would.

I live in Tempe, Arizona, a city of 161,000 in the Phoenix metro area. We're currently having a (very nasty) mayoral race. One of the candidates, Mark Mitchell, has been on the city council for 10 years, and is the son of a one-term US Congressman, Harry Mitchell. His current occupation is part-time carpet salesman. That's not exactly something rich people do. I once saw his father shopping at the local Fry's grocery store (which is one of the cheaper stores around here; it's a little higher-class than

Mitchell is a native of Tempe where he is a member of the Kiwanis Club of Tempe, Tempe Diablos, Tempe Leadership Class XV, Tempe Sister Cities, Tempe Impact Education Foundation, Tempe YMCA and a Board member of East Valley Partnership. Mitchell is currently on the Board of Directors for the National League of Cities (NLC), is the past Chair of the NLC City Futures Community and Regional Development Panel and a Board member for the NLC University Community Council. Mitchell is the past Chair of the University Community Council. Mitchell serves as the Vice President for the Executive Committee for the Arizona League of Cities and Towns.

Think about it, he has a family. If he could support them AND a political campaign on the income of a part-time carpet salesman, he'd have to have a metric assload of cash socked away. That doesn't make him super rich, but he's not exactly poor.

When the RIAA sues, typically they sue over a large number of different copyright protected works; with up to $150,000 in statutory damages available per work without proof of actual damages or infringers profits, they are able to rack up large statutory damage awards this way.

In the charge at issue here, Oracle has gotten a verdict on Google infringing a single work for which they have provided no evidence of actual damages or infringers profits. With up to $150,000 in statutory damages available per work, that gives them $150,000 in statutory damages available.

Its worth noting that the judge isn't informing Oracle that their damages are minimal. He has informed Oracle that they didn't bother presenting evidence on damages or infringers profits from the infringement of the work at issue, and since they didn't do that, there is no evidence in the case on which to find anything other than statutory damages.

The difference here is not a problem with the court system (I'm not saying that the court system does not, in many ways, favor the wealthier litigant, but the difference in the damages available in the two kinds of cases at issue in this subthread isn't actually that kind of issue.)

If there is a problem, its with the way copyright statutory damages work (either in being too generous in the kinds of cases the RIAA brings or being too stingy in the kind of case Oracle has brought.) But its not the the people targetted by the RIAA have succeeded less well in cases where the facts at issue were parallel to those in Oracle v. Google, its that the legal rules provide larger awards without proof of actual damages when lots of works are at issue than when fewer works are at issue.

Its worth noting that the judge isn't informing Oracle that their damages are minimal. He has informed Oracle that they didn't bother presenting evidence on damages or infringers profits from the infringement of the work at issue, and since they didn't do that, there is no evidence in the case on which to find anything other than statutory damages.

You do realize that the 9 lines were absolutely trivial and unimportant

Huh? Oh, sorry, I was distracted by realizing that my silly joke above somehow got moderated "Informative". I really have to wonder what the mods are on sometimes!

Yeah, trivial and unimportant. Trivial enough that any programmer (I won't even bother to qualify that with "competent") could probably reproduce in no more than five minutes just from the name alone. Trivial enough that to get nine lines, they must have been counting whitespace and braces. Yeah, nine dollars is probably more than it's worth.

This is one starving law firm and legal department. Imagine taking this to the ends of the earth.

Secret lawfirm partners meeting chatter:

"Hey, with over fifty time keepers running on this thing, it might go negative numbers, but we'll keep the rep that we'll burn every litigation right down to the bitter end. After all, this isn't about who wins, it's who has more kerosene..."

"What do they care, after all. With a 8% COGS, and a stock price that's at insane multiple of earnings, they have to continue make Go